Religion, Cleavages, and Right-Wing Populist Parties: The Italian Case

Luca Ozzano

The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 2019, vol. 17, issue 1, 65-77

Abstract: The political science literature analyzing the genetic profile of European political parties has mainly focused on the salience, for the identity of today’s parties, of four social cleavages rooted in European history: among them, a religious/secular cleavage created by the birth of the modern national state. However, in the past two decades, some contributions about new party types developed after the end of the Cold War have hypothesized the existence of new cleavages, based on materialist/post materialist sets of values and on the acceptance or rejection of globalization and Europeanization processes. This article will work on this latter hypothesis, by highlighting how some European parties, previously secular or focused on the “traditional” religious cleavage, are increasingly using religion-related arguments in the context of a civilizational stance focused on anti-globalization and anti-EU discourses, but most of all on the idea of migrants and Muslims as a threatening other. The second section of the paper will focus on the Italian case and on the development of a right-wing populist discourse on religion by the Lega Nord party.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/15570274.2019.1570761 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rfiaxx:v:17:y:2019:i:1:p:65-77

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rfia20

DOI: 10.1080/15570274.2019.1570761

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Faith & International Affairs is currently edited by Dennis R. Hoover

More articles in The Review of Faith & International Affairs from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().